Neos

In September 1981 Rob Duffy (19), John Hawke (15), Michael Stevenson (16) and I (age indeterminate) started Neos Young Writers, a magazine for — you guessed it — young writers. Raina MacIntyre (17) provided some spectacular art-work based on Eliot’s “Gerontion”.In time other editors joined us: for issue 2 (February 1982) the team was the same. The magazine continued until 1985, published by Gleebooks. Later editors included Gavin Murrell, Richard Allen, Hung Nguyen, Matt Da Silva and Lyneve Rappell. We won a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Award for service to young Australians, and a Literature Board Grant. We had the odd subscriber in England, Ireland, Italy and the USA! We even score a little entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (ed.2).John Hawke has continued to write and publish poetry, but has not yet had a book published (aside from editing a number of issues of the Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies). He studied at the University of Sydney where he tutored for a while in the English Department. The last I heard he was working in the Creative Writing Department at Wollongong University. Richard Allen (with his wife Karen Pearlman, whom he met in New York where he lived for some time) is very active, with several books published, dance works performed, and multi-media dance/poetry/video works achieving some success.

Here are some highlights from the first two issues. This is just a sample. And keep in mind that John Hawke was still 15 when Neos 1 was published!

FOREWORD TO ISSUE 2

Since the publication of the first issue of Neos, in September 1981, the concept of a magazine devoted to original writing by young people has met with considerable enthusiasm. Letters of encouragement have been received from a number of academics, as well as the Australian poets A D Hope, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Judith Wright and Bruce Beaver. Judith Wright said, in part, “I enjoyed the poems very much … I think they are fresh and exciting,” while Bruce Beaver noted: “The work throughout is colourful and inventive–a hopeful sign… The editors (particularly John Hawke) were delighted when Patrick White [Nobel Prize winner] responded by praising the prose poem “Obituary” and enclosing a subscription for the next three issues.

OBITUARY

John Hawke

Fifteen years spent in a small flat on Parramatta Road with his mother and two brothers (his father died in 1975) the second son John killed by a car to become the hundred and first road accident victim of 1981 (15 up on the same time last year) chewed on asphalt as sharp steel sheared his skin and tore him on the edges of concrete he had walked for fifteen years sucking at the same grey air to find breath for screaming through a mouth full of tar screams bouncing off ugly bricks a hot moist panting into his brother’s lungs helpless on the sidewalk and his mother who saw the crumpled white body and dropped her groceries he spent fifteen years in a small flat on Parramatta Road lived Parramatta Road until Parramatta Road chewed him up sucked between its teeth like wet cement until an iron girder scraped him away from Parramatta Road though the rest of the world passed him by.

[Neos 1 1981]

CHAIN MAIL

Richard James Allen (Written 1977. Richard was born in 1960.)

He stood skewbald and moultinga jeopardy, an enemy,stunting the round of my runround the stars.

Friendly as a hungry cat,sober as a sideboard,Cold potato.

Could not saddlemy stallion body with:“There’s nothing wrong with being friendsI don’t see any reason why we can’t be.Let’s lunch some time, don’t worry about the expense.”

Friends?I contracted to chain mail,dared not wait to seeif he was lonely.

[Neos 2 1982]

SECRETS

Richard James Allen (Written 1981)

i used to thinkif you were in a bad moodit was because of me

it was iwho had upset youwho had ruined your day

i used to thinkit was up to meto make you happy

now i realizeyou have problemsall your own

quite separate& apartfrom me

thoughtsinto whichi can never enter

worldson whose horizonsi never appear

[Neos 2 1982]

JERUSALEM 1918

John Hawke

The wind was always dry and hot,sweaty and dusty and we were always squinting:the sun would bounce off the white baked roadsstraight into your eyes; I felt so dark–probably just the dust, but it never seemed right, it seemedso empty and inhuman.

I don’t know if I saw a leaf all the time I was there:the trees all stunted and bare and twisted;never many animals: the occasional snake,and sometimes those long-necked birds, graceful,but brown and dappled so thatthey were never very beautiful.

You couldn’t say the country was either,but there was something about it–a sort of majestic calm, lifeless and menacing,as if it were the starkness of the earth itselfthat could suck you dry, twist you like the treesand leave you as colourless as everything else.

[Neos 1 1981]

DOVES

John Hawke

Now the slap of white wings catchesunpleasantly in my memory:the days when doves would flock around the brewery,Those rushing curvesthat sliced the sky in a fine white arcbecame a few old birds,smooth porcelain faded to feather and muscle.

[Neos 1 1981]

VALIUM MOTHER

John Hawke

Memories slap against your bedin dark waves every nightcrawling through your head,clanging the iron fibres of your brain,echoing. Stiff pale facessnatch at you from the darkness;The wind slopes through your open windowa slow white flame is clawing through you.

[Neos 1 1981]

FOR JUSTINE

John Hawke

I

If only for as far as you can estimateLife goes on, the universe tumblesbeyond our lifetime, trembleswithin its hard mask of expression and gesture,As wide as you can throw your arms or your voicebefore you settle again into the brittle shell of language.

Man’s only weapons are his dreams and memories,dry, unsatisfactory things, that separate and isolate.All light is drawn into the dark:There is only survival and rejuvenation–even the artist would not die for art.

II

This is the dream. Silent curtains of lightisolate us.Only the stillness of shadows and masksare left behind.Black water rushes beneath the city:The voice of the river clatters into darkness.This is the dream.

III

These things are very nearly words,almost palpable, like marbleglowing in the darkness,Something we can understandand never communicate.The stars are very cold, and the windbitter and bare: Small velvet birds[Neos 1 1981]

AFTERWORD TO NEOS 1

If you have enjoyed this first issue of Neos as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you, then our aims are achieved. We have had to select from material at hand; we hope you, our readers, will become contributors, widening the range on which we can draw. Yet we have been able to give you, in this initial sample, work in whose quality we believe…

We do not have rigid preconceptions concerning what and how you should write. But if we were to offer advice, it might be that of Ezra Pound*:

Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Go in fear of abstractions… Use either no ornament or good ornament… If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush… the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, … if a man use “symbols” he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.

Advice we aim at; we do not always succeed.

Second, expect to discover things as you write: that is the joy of writing, as Australian poet Robert Gray observed in Island Magazine (June 7 1981):

All those details [in the poem “Telling the Beads”] which sound as if they’re the record of an experience I’ve had of walking into a garden in the morning are things that actually I never knew I’d observed, and when I sat down with a white sheet of paper those things came into my mind like a new experience. They’d obviously been things I’d encountered somewhere, in some form, but then I really saw them for the first time on the white page as I wrote, which is one of the reasons one enjoys writing so much.

Third, revise what you’ve written. Of this Robert Gray said:

I keep the drafts, and I just trust to my response to know if and where I’ve overworked it, but usually I haven’t. To me, to write well is to have the exact word. It’s absolutely essential to choose only the words that are appropriate and nothing else… I just try to always work for the feeling of clarity… I think if you’re going to say something, if you’re going to open your mouth at all, you have to be prepared to really examine and define and refine what you’re talking about until you get it right.

If then we decide to use your work, you may get from us some suggestions for further revision. This is not meant to discourage you. Rather, see us not as “experts” (which we’re not) but as your writing partners, dedicated to bringing out as well as possible what you want to say.

* Charles Norman (ed), Poets on Poetry, NY, Collier 1962, pp 320-333. John Hawke reminded me of Pound’s important statement.RobertGray became a regular reader, I might add, and a keen supporter.Not everything in Neos was deadly serious, as the first poem to follow shows:

As if you could remember where the pain came from.It was a mere flash,The final slicing of air.(Bang Bang)

27thofJanuary,Telegrammed silence.I cannot forget the yellow of paperor the three sparse linesthat ran into the black edges.I heard it.

The walls were clean

Again.(Bang Bang)I heard it burn.(Bang)

I awoke,my lips numb,dripped purple fever,The morning heat:

AgainIt’s not easy to say why the sun screamed.

I never saw it,could have been the morning,I wasn’t watching,I wasn’tsure.

The distance echoed goldAgain.

[Neos 2 1982]

TRAIN

John Hawke

The mountains have been washed away.Our trainProjected through the stormon wires of greythunder. The old hikerspeaks through glass,“It’s raining violets”.The flowers stand out like torches.I’m thinking of you, a taut red line,Fourteen and strung out on Eliot nightmares.

[Neos 2 1982]

HALF-LIGHT

Richard James Allen (Written 1979)

Half-lightand the curtains are still drawn.

Close the door, I hate the footstepsin the hall,knocking like a dry heart.

Touch the black-wood chestits grain breaking through the stainlike streaks of sunset through clouds,tides seeping across another sky.

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